


Queen of the Hospital

by COBALT (nacaratskies)



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: (sort of?), Aftermath of Violence, Au: palm isn’t a pedo, Body Horror, Character Study, Gore, Hive Mind, I promise it’s not as pretentious as it sounds, Kinda culty aspects at times, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Palm coming to terms with being an ant, Past Torture, Post-Chimera Ant Arc, Surreal, Why Did I Write This?, Yeahhh they rly messed her up, i don’t fw that, i just wanted to do a character study, ok that was a lie it’s pretty friggin pretentious
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-13 14:00:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29527461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nacaratskies/pseuds/COBALT
Summary: The aftermath, according to Palm Siberia.
Relationships: Palm Siberia & Ikalgo & Meleoron, past Knov/Palm (unrequited?)
Kudos: 2





	Queen of the Hospital

**Author's Note:**

> I already said this in the notes but AU WHERE PALM ISNT INTO GON I HATE IT HERE WHY ARE THERE SO MANY PEDOS IN THIS SERIES 
> 
> Anyway I just wanted to write a bit about like.... anthood, and recovery, and where Palm’s headed after the King dies. So this is that 
> 
> If you’re trying to avoid/prepare for the gore and torture, it’s in the scene that starts with “Knov doesn’t react badly”. Please check the tags for TW stuff

Palm's been relieved of her duties in official capacity, classified as _severely injured and/or temporarily incapacitated_. Morel sorted that all out. He's been on his feet since the day of the battle. Normally this would be a bad idea, but he got off relatively easy and seems to enjoy having administrative duties to keep him busy until the shock passes. He doesn't seem too upset, even, since nobody was injured too badly—"Nobody's missing any limbs," he jokes to Palm, "that weren't already gone." It seems criminal and miraculous at the same time, somehow, in a battle that felt like such a culmination, that they haven't lost anyone. (Not yet, anyway—Shoot and Gon are still critical.)

Palm's one duty is to supervise the King and Komugi, and she does, gladly, but they seem to be going strong. She's got to distract herself, though, frequently, so as not to think too hard about it. She doesn't think about how she felt hiding in that closet. She doesn't ask about Knov or Gon. Anything she might learn would only be bad, and she has a feeling that Knov has been forbidden from seeing her until the King has died. So be it.

Humans look at her with horror and pity and maybe a little fear, and it's annoying, so she hangs out with Meleoron and Ikalgo and they play cards on the roof in the dark.

When Palm closes one eye and checks Wink Blue, the two fall silent and stare at her. They don't have to be ordered to be reverent. It's been woven deep, deep into their DNA to care about this man who they've never known, never spoken to. The King is a smallgod, fed by the prayers of his people, his dead and dying people, his people who reject being his people. Even the prayers cannot save him from the evil of man. At least he can be wild and raw and singing with power while he lives.

When Palm sees the King crouched at a wooden table playing Gungi something wild and feral awakens in her. She is afraid of it. Meleoron and Ikalgo are afraid too, of her and of the same animal instinct in themselves. She knows they each have different perspectives and feelings about this feeling, hating it and loving it at different angles, but while they sit playing cards on the roof, in this place and in these people that have become an unholy mixture of the naturally wild and the frighteningly domestic, in the little Chimera Church they have built together, in the cold, in the wind, in the dark, it doesn't matter. They can hate it or love it all they want, it makes no difference. It's all one long, glorious, awful prayer, no matter what they do.

Then she opens her eyes, says, "Nothing new yet," and they go on playing cards as if nothing happened. In another life this would have irritated Palm to the point of actual murder. Her irritation is redirected now. She is angry inwards, and upwards, and Kingwards, and people think it's strange how calm and steady she has become.   


* * *

Her skin is pale blue at times and in certain lights. Half iridescent, half transparent. The veins underneath are blue, blue, blue. In her peripheral vision there is a hovering purple shape. In her peripheral vision there are two eye sockets. Her hair trails long and greasy and curly just the way she likes it, across shoulders the same way they’ve always been, only blue, blue, blue like that man’s wings shimmering, like his blood dripping onto the ground. Her nails are long, the way she likes them. Her scales are well-cleaned. She’s had to learn to clean underneath them, but they’re buffed and polished and shed and set to rights, and they shine like painted nails. Her arms itch under her scales. They itch and itch and itch.   
  
She’s still human-looking, for all that. Human eyes, human hands, human teeth. At least she didn’t end up like Meleoron or Ikalgo. They checked her internal organs and said it’s all more or less the same besides the new blood composition, but something inside her feels wrong, and it never goes away. It lives right below her stomach, right at the pit of her torso, right where she can’t reach to press and scratch. Hunger, but not hunger. Nausea, but not nausea. Panic, but not panic. Something is deeply, _deeply_ wrong, and it never goes away.   
  
Comparatively, she got off easy. 

* * *

Palm misses what she has never known. She sits in the heart of the hospital and closes her eyes and misses the Queen and thinks about Colt, with whom she has never actually had a conversation. The hospital is full of staff and patients and they buzz around taking things from place to place to keep it running through long and twisting hallways built by the hands of their own kind. They run around just like ants.

 _But there's no Queen_ , Palm thinks with deep consternation. _Where is the Queen of the Hospital? Maybe she could help Gon._ Then she blinks and knows she is being silly.

She wants to ask Meleoron or Ikalgo to describe to her what it felt like to be in that nest, huge and imposing and beautiful, but doesn't dare ask, out of embarrassment. She wants to visit it, but doesn't dare ask, for fear she'll be locked up or killed. She wants to call Colt and whisper, Come worship with us, and nothing more. She knows he would understand perfectly.

* * *

The King is dead.

The King is dead, and the world is so cruel and brutal, and all of a sudden, the rest of Palm's life stretches out so unbearably long in front of her, and it looks so unbearably empty, so unbearably exhausting.

She's relieved, she’s horrified, she’s grieving, and they write it down in their ledgers and they don’t understand that _something unique and beautiful has died forever, damn it, why aren’t you crying too? How dare you look at me like that? You’re the one who doesn’t make any sense here!_

She finally looks down at herself and begins to understand what has been done to her, and alone in her hospital room, she bursts into tears and rubs her scaly arms against the sheets as if the horrible itchy things will come off.

They don't come off.

* * *

Knov doesn't react badly to her scaly skin. He turns and grips her hand, still now looking at her. "Palm," he says, a trembling smile audible in his tone. "You're okay. You felt it, didn't you?" She doesn't have to ask. The man who ties them both together—whom neither of them really knew—hangs between them, a rainbow phantom. She did feel it. It was blue, deep admiral blue, like the sky just before dawn.

"Yes." She thinks for a second, then adds in the hope that it will help: "I punched him in the face. He's dead now." She wants to tell him everything: how they carted his body away like a specimen, dumped it in a body bag labelled Biohazard Containment. The depths of her grief and rage sickened her. She wanted to scream, _Stop, stop, don't you know what you're doing? That's a Royal Guard, show some respect!_ But she didn't say anything. She just stared at the smear of blood in the dirt, the trail of half-liquefied dark blue viscera he'd vomited up, the exact same colour as his aura. It was obscene, but mundane, like the murder scene of an ant that someone stepped on. She wants to cry and tell Knov, _It was awful, oh, it was just awful, they carted him away to cut apart like some worthless bug!_ But she doesn't.

"It was evil, wasn't it?" Knov is trembling. "Wasn't it the most evil thing you've ever felt?"

He and Pitou, together, had brought Palm to a cold room and worked on her together. They had fun exploring her strange human intestines. Needles were sharp on her insides, small scissors snipping white nerves, severing them with a neat chop of the blades. Scalpels glided through the stiff and tender meat of her liver and brain with a smooth _shhhik_. And all that time red aura had forced its way down her throat like fistfuls of red ants, burning, swarming, somehow both liquid and hard, living and rotting. And the blue aura had limned it, searching at the edges of the cuts. Pitou had shown him: _look, here is how the human body works_. Ever the avid learner, he had been delighted. Palm had been terrified. It was evil, wasn't it? Wasn't it the most evil thing she'd ever felt?

 _No_.

But the words don't come out. She should feel violated but instead she feels ashamed that she wasn't already born an ant, ready and waiting to serve. She's ashamed they wasted their time on her. _No. It was beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing I've ever felt._ And then she is silent, unthinking, bathing in that memory for a long time. That blue aura is gone now. Forever. She should have smeared the blood-soaked grime into her face and hair and clothes that were already saturated with embryonic fluid. She should have torn and eaten at Pouf's vomited viscera, swallowed the stink of curdled blood and bile and acid and let the dirt and slime coat her tongue. Maybe that would have made the wonderful fear linger just a little longer. Maybe then she wouldn't feel so fucking empty.

"I—I'm sorry," Knov says, and his words are disjointed and choppy. "I shouldn't have asked—"

"Yes," Palm says. "It was the most evil thing I've ever felt." And she shudders at her own lie.  


* * *

Knov never did finish the Secret Garden, but he can't focus enough to read. Palm reads it to him. One hand on the book, one on his shoulder.

_"Why do you keep looking at me like that?"_

_"Because of the dreams that are so real," he answered rather fretfully. "Sometimes when I open my eyes I don't believe I'm awake."_

_"We're both awake," said Mary. She glanced round the room with its high ceiling and shadowy corners and dim fire-light. "It looks quite like a dream, and it's the middle of the night, and everybody in the house is asleep—everybody but us. We are wide awake."_

_"I don't want it to be a dream," the boy said restlessly._

"Palm," Knov says. "Let's go somewhere."

"Where?"

"Let's go sit on the roof."

"Why?"

"I'm sick of this room."

She helps him up and he unlocks the door. Together they step onto the hospital roof. It's sunny and warm up here. The sunlight makes Knov look a little bit healthier.

"I heard you and Morel talking," he says.

Palm refuses to be embarrassed. "Oh?"

"You should tell him not to worry about me."

"It's too late for that. I already told him, and even then he worried himself half to death.”

"Tell him anyway. It'll sound better if it comes from me." He sits down right there in the middle of the roof. "I already feel better now that they're dead."

"That's good to hear."

He pauses. "What about you?"

"Me?"

"Aren’t you going to try and change your body back?" he asks, not looking at her.

Palm's scales itch. "It's not possible."

"What are you going to tell your friends?"

"I don't have any."

That genuinely surprises him, which genuinely surprises her in turn. "Really?" he asks.

"Yep." She nods. "We travelled too much."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be," she half-sputters, desperate not to have him submit to her. "People thought I was a freak anyway."

"I never did," he says. She's not sure if it's a brag or reassurance.

“That’s a lie. You tried not to, though. That's why I loved you."

"Do you still?" Ah, he's too clever for that now. Saw right through her.

"I don't know." She shrugs, as if it doesn't really matter. "Probably not."

"You lied when you came back, didn't you? You said you're still Palm, but you're not." Yep. Right through her, like glass.

"Well, I am, and I'm not." Palm shrugs again. "They made a soldier and they failed. I died and I didn't. I hate them and I don't. It's complicated."

"Not very."

She hesitates, considers this. Then she nods. "No, you're right. It's contradictory, but not complicated.” Then she adds, “People contradict themselves all the time,” though she’s not really sure who she’s defending herself against. 

"That's true," Knov says, and they spend the rest of the day on the roof in silence.

**Author's Note:**

> Full offense but like...... when Palm told the King not to kneel because it’s in her blood now to worship him...... that awakened some sort of inspiration fever in me and I had 2 write abt it. I didn’t even come close to covering all the chimera ant psychology thoughts (tm) I have tbh but I hope it gave u something to think about 
> 
> Comments are appreciated :)


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